LLM Basics
Matteo Gala
“This technology will make us forget everything.”
Plato, Phaedrus · about 370 BC
Socrates. About writing.
“Not truth, but the semblance of truth.”
Where knowledge lives
Fear sees the cost.
The gain comes later.
How learning changes
My mother’s school booklet
What did your grandparents learn at school that you never had to?
Finding 好 in a paper dictionary
1 · Radical index
女 → list on p. 52
2 · Characters under 女
好 → p. 183
3 · Page 183
好 hǎo
good; well; fine
Deep Blue, Computer History Museum · Anton Chiang, CC BY 2.0Chess, and then languages?
It reads tokens, not words
It guesses the next piece
The capital of Italy is
Meanings become points
Close in meaning, close in space.
king − man + woman
≈ queen
word2vec, 2013
Plausible ≠ true
So: verify
Context is its only memory
Same engine, different cars
The myth
Prompt engineering
Same request, two desks
Explain the job
as you would to a person.
Chat or workspace?
Meanwhile, the agents…
On its desk: the lesson title and date, the course portal
→ the lesson audio
On its desk: one audio file, nothing else
→ the transcript
On its desk: the transcript and the notes written so far
→ notes, with what the professor took for granted filled in
On its desk: the notes of every lesson in the module
→ a playable city of the study game
On its desk: the finished city
→ the city in Spanish, Russian and French too
Don’t polish the prompt.
Fill the desk.
Over to you
Handout below the slides, same link.
This page follows the slides live: nothing to click. On a phone, turn it sideways for bigger slides.